(no subject)

[decemberthirty]

Why on earth would I want to grade my students' papers when there's a book meme that I could be doing instead? You guys have seen this one, I'm sure. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Now everyone will see some of the gaping holes in my reading, and you all can tell which of these books I ought to go and read right now, and which ones I can allow to pass me by without a second thought.

Bold the ones you've read,
underline the ones you read for school,
italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
add * beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend.

The Aeneid*
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay***
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved*
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas*
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners* [Okay, it's true that I haven't read the whole thing. But I've read several of the stories, and I certainly plan to read the rest. It deserves the asterisk for "The Dead" alone.]
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things******
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences****
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner [Bah]
Les Misérables
Life of Pi: a novel
Lolita*********************
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
1984
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King******
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
Oryx and Crake
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [On the list for this summer]
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran
The Satanic Verses [How can I call myself a Rushdie fan? I know, I know...]
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury**************
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses******************************
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down*********
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights [This one makes me wish there was some way to indicate books you've ready but absolutely despised...]
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Comments

26 from the list are mine(;

[mcdato.livejournal.com]

I would advise your reading Dostoevskiy's The Idiot and The Karamazows Brothers beyond The Crime and Punishmet, you won't feel him comprehensively without them. But the list is already huge. I've had the same when passing the 19th cen. world literature, uh!
Hopefully I'll post my review on Rushdie (just finished his Midnight's Children - tremendous!, but unfortunately in Russian) here in the journal, and I'll do it in English - mostly analysis of his style and the ways of possible translation. But I don't really know when, too much work all the time. So we'll compare impessions, if everything's all right.

Re: 26 from the list are mine(;

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

I'd love to compare impressions of Midnight's Children with you. It's one of my favorites of Rushdie's books, although it's been almost eight years since I read it...

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

You must read In the Name of the Rose! You must!

I'm glad you liked Watership Down. :)

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

Watership Down is an old favorite from way back. I've read it a bunch of times, but my favorite time was probably when I read it out loud to my little sister when she was about eight.

I know I should read The Name of the Rose--it's one of those books that sits perennially on my to-read list and never seems to come off. I should probably make the effort to really read it this summer, though.

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

And I just noticed that you haven't read The Blind Assassin, either - that would be a good one to read this summer.

[glazed-glitter.livejournal.com]

you must read love in the time of cholera immediately. i liked it so much better than 100 yrs of solitude. really it's fabulous.

yay for millions of stars after Lolita!

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

Interesting.... I didn't really like 100 Years of Solitude, and that had pretty much prejudiced me against Garcia Marquez. But if Love in the Time of Cholera really is better, perhaps I should give him another chance.

[glazed-glitter.livejournal.com]

I didn't really like One Hundred Years of Solitude either. I read Love in the Time of Cholera after that and just completely loved it. I can't remember what i thought the difference was, though.

[slowlyawake.livejournal.com]

KITE RUNNER SUX 4-EVA

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

Thank you for raising the level of literary discourse here on my journal. ;)

[lamaros.livejournal.com]

What did you read The Aeneid in? Prose? And by which author. My copy is somewhat dull, is interesting, and I think another translation would be better.

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

I read The Aeneid in Latin by Virgil, and I'm afraid I can offer no suggestions that will be better than that.

[lamaros.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

[merkuria.livejournal.com]

hey, would you mind if I stole the list? would be fun to do it in my lj

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

Sure, no problem. Do I know you? :)

[merkuria.livejournal.com]

no, I found your journal through a comment at iamzulma's journal....hmm, sounds stalkerish, but no evilness intended :)

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

That's not stalkerish; it's perfectly normal! We are on lj after all... :)